I mean your heads big, but it's not that big.

Let's take a closer look at Death of a Salesman and how it combines a realistic family drama

with a more expressionist style to show the corrupting influence of the American Dream. Help us out thoughtbubble.

The play takes place in 24 hours, plus flashbacks.

When it opens, Willy Loman has just returned unsuccessful and exhausted from a sales trip.

His wife Linda wants him to ask his boss Howard if Willy can stop traveling. But Willy is reluctant.

Later that day, Linda tells her son Biff and Happy that Willy has tried to kill himself.

To cheer Willy up, the boys tell him that they're gonna go into business together.

Biff is a dropout and a kleptomaniac and Happy is a womanizer and weakling.

But Willy still believes that both his boys can be successful, which is all that matters to Willy.

There's a flashback to happier days when Biff was a high school football star.

And then there's a more ambivalent flashback which shows Willy with his mistress.

Willy also has a vision of his older brother Ben who left Brooklyn first for Africa then Alaska and became rich.

Willy has always regretted not joining him.

Willy gets fired from his job. Biff never gets to make his business proposal.

And during what's supposed to be a celebratory dinner, Biff tries to tell his father the truth.

And Willy flashes back to the time Biff caught him with his mistress,

a trauma that led Biff to give up on summer school and his hopes of an athletic scholarship.

Biff and Happy leave the restaurant, deserting their father.

Later that night, Biff again tries to confess. But Willy won't hear him. Instead, he has a vision of his brother Ben.

Willy is convinced that the best way to support his family is by killing himself, allowing his family to collect the insurance money.

We hear him drive away and the final scene finds the family at his funeral,

with Linda revealing that she has made the final payment on the mortgage.

"We're free and clear." She tells her dead husband: "We're free. We're free…" Thanks thought-bubble

Well, that was tragic and it illustrates Miller's arguments that the common man is act a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as Kings were.

With its shifts in time and its emphasis on the tension between illusion and reality, comforting lies, and cold truth,

salesman lays bare the American myth that a good life is a commercially and financially successful one.

Willy is so wedded to this vision that he can't see himself or his family clearly.

And yet, Miller also insists that everyone, even a man is misguided as Willy, is a creature of dignity who deserves our respect.

The last figure we'll look at today is Lorraine Hansberry.

She was born in Chicago in 1932 middle-class politically active parents.

During her childhood, the family attempted to move to a white neighborhood and were met with violent racism.

Introduced to theater in high school and at the University of Wisconsin, Hansberry worked as a journalist and activist before turning to playwriting.

In 1957, she wrote A Raisin in the Sun, loosely inspired by her family and the discrimination that they faced.

Play opened on Broadway in 1959 and as James Baldwin wrote "never before in the entire history

of the American theatre had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage."

Hansberry was African-American, so like Williams who was gay and Miller who was Jewish,

she was able to write about American society from the position of someone who was both inside and outside of it.

Raisin in the Sun is a specific realistic portrait of a multi-generational urban black family

and also a more general consideration of what it means to live in a world that doesn't always want or value you.

Raisin's Walter younger jr, like Blanche DuBois or Willy Loman, is trying to find his way in a world that doesn't necessarily have a place for him.

Raisin in the Sun, which takes its title from Langston Hughes poem about dreams deferred, centers on the younger family.

They live on Chicago's South Side in a roach filled apartment.

They're about to receive an insurance policy payout of ten thousand dollars, enough to substantially improve their lives.

Mama, the grandmother, wants to buy a house in a better neighborhood, while her son Walter wants to invest in a liquor store.

And her daughter Benny wants to use the money for medical school.

When Walters wife becomes pregnant and worries that the family can't afford another child, mama buys a house in an all-white neighborhood.

A homeowner tries to buy her out. but mama holds firm even after Walter loses the rest of his money to a scheming friend.

As the play ends, the youngers are leaving their home. On the way, they hope to a better life.

The play won a Drama Critics Circle Award, was turned into a movie for Columbia Pictures, and continues to be widely performed.

Just when it seems like Broadway has become the place for serious American drama, New York is gonna open up a few more places not on Broadway.

And it is going to call those places, you guessed it, Off Broadway.

Join us next time when we explore the rise of off-broadway, off-off-broadway, and off-off-off Broadway.

Now I'm just kidding, or am I?

And the rise of the Black Arts Movement. but until then, off Curtin!